Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, with the weight of the world upon him.  And if one is to criticise at all, he may say that, if Carlyle had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his work would have been better done.  Yet to whom do we owe more, even as Americans?  Anti-democratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, or in the quality of his make.  The nobility of labor and the essential nobility of man were never so effectively preached before.  The deadliest enemy of democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, but it is the spirit, rife among us, which would engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly and decayed standards of the expiring feudal world.

With two or three exceptions, there is little as yet in American literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and scholastic,—­little, I mean, in which one gets a whiff of the strong, unbreathed air of mountain or prairie, or a taste of rude, new power that is like the tonic of the sea.  Thoreau occupies a niche by himself.  Thoreau was not a great personality, yet his writings have a strong characteristic flavor.  He is anti-scorbutic, like leeks and onions.  He has reference, also, to the highest truths.

It is very likely true that our most native and original characters do not yet take to literature.  It is, perhaps, too early in the day.  Iron and lime have to pass through the vegetable before they can reach the higher organization of the animal, and maybe this Western nerve and heartiness will yet emerge on the intellectual plane.  Let us hope that it will indeed be Western nerve and heartiness when it gets there, and not Eastern wit and epigram!

In Abraham Lincoln we had a character of very marked and lofty type, the most suggestive study or sketch of the future American man that has yet appeared in our history.  How broad, unconventional, and humane!  How democratic! how adhesive!  No fine arabesque carvings, but strong, unhewn, native traits, and deep lines of care, toil, and human sympathy.  Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech is one of the most genuine and characteristic utterances in our annals.  It has the true antique simplicity and impressiveness.  It came straight from the man, and is as sure an index of character as the living voice, or the physiognomy, or the personal presence.  Indeed, it may be said of Mr. Lincoln’s entire course while at the head of the nation, that no President, since the first, ever in his public acts allowed the man so fully to appear, or showed so little disposition to retreat behind the featureless political mask which seems to adhere to the idea of gubernatorial dignity.

It would be hardly fair to cite Everett’s speech on the same occasion as a specimen of the opposite style, wherein ornate scholarship and the pride of talents dominate.  Yet a stern critic would be obliged to say that, as an author, Everett allowed, for the most part, only the expurgated, complimenting, drawing-room man to speak; and that, considering the need of America to be kept virile and broad at all hazards, his contribution, both as man and writer, falls immeasurably short of Abraham Lincoln’s.